Big Data & Analytics Heroes

Mark Hilinski

Executive Vice President of Business Development and Strategic Accounts, The Retail Equation

The Retail Equation utilizes big data to predict and shape shopper behavior. Mark Hilinski, executive vice president of business development and strategic accounts and this week’s IBM Big Data Hero, shares how they “uncover those patterns of activity that were otherwise unseen in the data” and identify fraud.

How have big data and analytics impacted how you do your job today?

We spend a lot of time finding all the fraud associated with returns. That might seem like a small niche market but…We are up to eighteen-to-twenty billion dollars in this market with this huge problem. Without having the ability to understand all the data elements involved, it is very tricky to understand the difference between a good customer and a bad customer. PureData for Analytics and our proprietary linking system… uncover the patterns of activity that were otherwise unseen in the data.

What "gold nuggets" have you uncovered using big data and analytics?

So in eighty milliseconds, or less, we are returning an answer back to the clerk to approve, decline or warn on that transaction. PureData for Analytics is the one partner that is going to actually help us move into the future with actionable insights and allow us to help our retailing partners make better, brighter and faster decisions as we continue to move into this era of big data.